Last week the UvA received a positive quality assessment of the NVAO (the accreditation organization tasked with providing an expert and objective assessment of the quality of higher education in the Netherlands and Flanders).

In their review, the committee expressed its admiration for the way in which the UvA monitors its quality assurance using UvAData (the datawarehouse) and UvAQ (which reports are also build and distributed using the datawarehouse). For the full press release, click here.

With this positive quality assessment, the UvA saves a lot of time and effort that otherwise needs to be spend in order to thoroughly asses every program individually.

In conclusion: A good datawarehouse saves time and
effort and has good business value.

One of the topics that is getting more attention lately is ‘Robotics Process Automation’ (RPA). At Tacstone we build a new proposition on this service. In essence this is a new software service that allows to automate processes, without having to modify the existing software systems. The software can logon, simulate keyboard- and mouse input, […]

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a Scrum Master training, given by Zilverline. I have to admit, I was skeptical at first about Scrum. I am a trained Prince2 Practitioner, so I figured, this is probably “just old wine in new bags”, as we say in Holland. And in a way that is […]

An interesting course offered by openSAP is Enterprise deep learning with TensorFlow, which is currently running in its last week. I found this a great insight in the current state of machine learning possibilities. It was a very hands-on training where it was possible to play with TensorFlow Applications, an open-source library for numerical computation. […]

O n March this year I enrolled in the open sap course ‘Getting Started with Data Science’. It was a great insight in the business value a data scientist can have and how SAP can make their life easier. Some elements I like to point out. Project methodology What I really liked in the course […]

SAP Lumira and Tableau are both data visualization tools that can be used to explore data. Recently I did small projects in both tools, so I am finally able to make a comparison. Tableau Based on my experience of working with Tableau (version 10.3) I found that the tool is amazingly rich. There is great […]

Last month (April 2017) I had the pleasure to attend the Higher Education & Research User Group (HERUG) conference in Amsterdam. I was also an presenter at two sessions. On Tuesday I was presenting together with Pieter-Jan Aartsen of the UvA about the project we did with the implementation of the IMR. Partly this has […]

SAP Lumira is a great tool with a lot of possibilities. However, when it comes to the integration in an existing environment, there remain a few inconveniences. Imagine an existing environment where several connected applications have been built with SAP Design Studio, based on SAP BW, which is reached through a SAP Netweaver portal, using […]

This week I brought a report live that uses the International Business Communication Standards (IBCS) as the guideline in presenting information. Although this report can only be considered as a small baby step, still the benefits of using standards are clear. In the begin of this year I was at the book launch of the […]

Last month SAP has announced the next generation of SAP Business Warehouse, BW/4HANA. This logical step in the evolution of the Business Warehouse is completely dedicated to the HANA platform, and as such, can do without millions lines of coding to support other databases. Also, it has unloaded the heritage of previous SAP BW versions […]

Last month I finished the Open SAP Course Text Analytics with SAP HANA Platform. This was a nice opportunity to get a grip of the concepts involved. So in this blog, I give a short overview of the concepts I learned about Text Analytics and Text Mining. Text Analytics Text Analytics can be used to: search […]

In April 2015 I wrote an evaluation about the experience we had with SAP BO Design Studio 1.3, after being live for 5 months. The general feeling was that the new application was a huge substantial improvement, but we were also waiting for some enhancements to come. So now, with the new release of Design […]

These days I am reading the new book of Stephen Few, Signal. As always with books of Stephen Few, it sets my daily work in a new perspective and is inspiration for several ideas. One of the chapters I particularly like is about ‘correlation and causation’. To summarize the conclusion: it is important to always […]